Hollywood vs. history / Historians say 'Pearl Harbor's' version of the World War II attack is off the mark

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"Pearl Harbor" may be scoring at the box office, but it's getting failing grades from historians, who see it as oversimplified and inaccurate.

"They spent 150 million on this thing," says Harry Gailey, author of the acclaimed "War in the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay." "They should have been able to afford two or three dollars for a historian."

Gailey, who has written seven books on the Pacific theater of World War II, admires the spectacle but doesn't see much history in the new movie. Bruce Reynolds, also a nationally regarded military historian, agrees. The author of "Thailand and Japan's Southern Advance: 1941-1945," Reynolds is an authority on modern Asian history, and he teaches a course on World War II at San Jose State. "History is complicated," he says. "When you try to portray it, facts are distorted, and the context gets jerked around."

In this case, really jerked around. The experts saw plenty of anachronisms, jumblings of fact, odd points of emphasis and mistakes. Some are small. For example, in the first scene, two boys in 1923 play with a crop duster that was not commercially available until the late '30s.

Other mistakes are bigger. "They have Japanese torpedo bombers attacking the American airfields," says Gailey. "What are they going to torpedo on an airfield?"

The film puts 21st century communications technology into 1940s aircraft. The pilots communicate with the ease with men in a control tower; and, in a later scene, a woman in Hawaii is able to hear, as if over the radio, an entire battle play out, thousands of miles away.

"The idea that she can hear the in-plane radios while sitting back in Hawaii is nonsense," says Reynolds. "Planes did not have radios like that. And the control-tower scene is ludicrous. These things are pure Hollywood and have no relation to reality."

The film depicts the commanding officer, Admiral Kimmel, finding out about the attack while on a golf course, and it also shows Americans playing baseball as the Japanese planes fly in.

"But Kimmel hadn't left for the golf course," says Reynolds. "And who plays baseball at 7 in the morning?"

The movie depicts the war as coming as something of a surprise to the American leadership. But Reynolds points out that as early as Nov. 26 the Navy was issuing a "war warning" to all its officers, and the Army said that a "hostile action was possible any moment."

When the battle starts, the fighter pilots played by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett take off from an airfield that's under aerial assault. Their heroics parallel that of real-life pilots George Welch and Kenneth Taylor, but they didn't take off under those conditions. "They were at a smaller airfield, to the west," says Gailey.

Later the pilots are recruited by Lt. Col. James Doolittle for a bombing raid over Tokyo. "But this was a bombing mission," says Gailey. "Doolittle needed bombers, not fighter pilots. They're not the same thing."

FDR NO STRANGELOVE

Both historians expressed doubts about Franklin D. Roosevelt's big scene, in which he pulls a "Dr. Strangelove" and struggles out of his wheelchair in order to show his cabinet that the impossible can happen. It's actor Jon Voight's hammiest moment, but neither historian has ever read of any incident remotely like that.

"Roosevelt in this movie was a caricature -- a caricature of somebody who wasn't Roosevelt," says Reynolds. "The movie has him making John Wayne-type speeches. Roosevelt didn't talk like that. It's entirely contrived."

The movie also suggests that Japan had a chance of winning the war, and that if it had pressed its advantage, it could have invaded the United States all the way from California to Chicago. "That's garbage about Chicago," says Reynolds. "Pure fantasy. Japan had no such ambitions or plans."

CALIFORNIA DREAMING

"There are only so many soldiers you can get on a ship," says Gailey. "Where could they have invaded on the West Coast? It would never have worked."

Though neither historian was swept away by the film, Reynolds thinks some good may come of it. "The best thing that could happen is that people will see it, be entertained and come away interested in why this stuff happened."

And Gailey, who was in high school at the time of Pearl Harbor, says the movie at least got some things right.

"They were reasonably accurate about the era," says Gailey. "They were pretty accurate about the attitude of the people. And the automobiles. And the swing music. They did a good job on that."